There's a sickness in the culture when people laugh about torture.

Let Talk about Tasers

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Nowadays, the theme of civil liberties seem to be a sub-plot to a James Bond flick rather than "To Kill A Mockingbird." And yet, I think the two are intertwined much more closely that we think. In our apparent acceptance of torture as a legal method of interrogation, the bar of civilized official behavior has been lowered to the point where we are accepting torture in everyday life as if it's nothing. Indeed, we are using it as a form of entertainment. I'm speaking of the ever more common use of the Taser, an electrical device used by police and other authorities to drop its victims to the ground and coerce instant compliance. The videos of various incidents make the rounds on the internet and you can see by the comments at the YouTube site that a large number of Americans find tasering to be a sort of slapstick comedy, the equivalent of someone slipping on a banana peel, with a touch of that authoritarian cruelty that always seems to amuse a certain kind of person. "Don't tase me bro" is a national catch phrase.
Tasers aren't benign however. They kill people. Nobody knows exactly why some people die from being tasered, and they certainly don't know how to tell in advance which ones are at risk. But there have been hundreds of deaths similar to the one below, which nobody can adequately explain:

A Detroit teenager who police say fled a traffic stop Friday died after being subdued with a Taser. He is the second Michigan teen to die following a Taser stun in less than a month. Warren Police say they don't know why the 15-year-old bailed out of a Dodge Stratus he was riding in during the stop on Eight Mile near Schoenherr, leading officers on a half-block chase that ended in an abandoned house on Pelkey in Detroit. The car was stopped for having an expired license plate. In the scuffle, officers shocked the teen one time with a Taser, police said. Shortly after, he became unresponsive and died.

Taser International has successfully defended themselves in lawsuits by attributing the deaths to drug use and if that doesn't work do to the fact that drugs were not present in the victim, they rely on an unrecognized medical condition called "excited delirium", a disease that only afflicts people who die in police custody. Juries apparently find this convincing. Taser has only lost one case.MORE

Yo.

I gotta say that I hate Microsoft with the power of a thousand suns, but their Bing gets me info better than Google. Google needs to raise the bar. Like...now.

I am not comfortable with prisons being seen as a job creation

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation. In the face of an unprecedented economic crisis, some states are beginning to consider reducing their prison populations. But other states are looking to do just the opposite in an effort to create jobs. Today, David Fathi Director of Human Rights Watch’s US Program, Glenn E. Martin, Vice President of Development and Public Affairs at the David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy, and Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women on the future of prison reform in the United States.

Al Jazeera's People and Power Corporations on Trial

People & Power - Dumping Ground - 20 May 09

People & Power examines a legal case brought against one of the worlds largest independent oil traders, alleging it illicitly dumped toxic material.

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